Ice wide open: reconstructed Kings kick off NHL season.

THE off-season brought the Los Angeles Kings more action than last year's months on the ice.

In a massive spring-cleaning, the local National Hockey League team tossed out virtually the whole front office, the coaching staff and some players, too.

Now begins the mammoth task of turning a sporadically successful franchise--though it hasn't won a championship in its 40-year existence--into a playoff team.

The Kings have missed the postseason for three consecutive years and eight times in the 12 years since their lone Stanley Cup Finals. They have suffered three first-round losses in the four years they did make the playoffs.

To try to change that, Tim Leiweke, chief executive of the Anschutz Entertainment Group and Los Angeles point man for media-shy Denver billionaire Phil Anschutz, ushered in the new regime: General Manager Dean Lombardi and Coach Marc Crawford. Crawford replaces Andy Murray, and Lombardi took over for veteran Kings icon Dave Taylor.

And the management change was just the beginning. On-ice additions include Alyn McCauley, defenseman Rob Blake and goaltender Dan Cloutier.

The overhaul has extended as far as the training facilities, too: the team spent nearly half a million dollars renovating its El Segundo training facility, reconfiguring rooms and spending some of the money to add Kings images and memorabilia to lend a sense of history.

The NHL's 2004-05 season lockout did some damage to the entire league, leaving teams like the Kings with much work to do last season to bring fans back from a year off.

"The management changes didn't have too much to do with the NHL lockout, they were more specific to the team," said Mike Altieri, the Kings' vice president of broadcasting and communication. "If we wouldn't have had a lockout, I think these changes would still have been made."

Lombardi has emphasized a long-term strategy for the club, and he's said it will be a couple years before he has the organization's infrastructure in place.

For this season, ticket prices have increased an average of 7 percent across the board, and now range from $26 to $120.50

"The thinking behind raising prices was looking at our average prices compared to NHL as whole," said Chris McGown, the team's senior vice president of sales and marketing. "We were in the bottom third and we want to generate more revenue."

The bulk of the team's income is currently derived from ticket sales, followed by sponsorship sales and broadcast rights, McGowan said.

Attendance last season averaged 17,821 a game, with 27 sellout games, down slightly from the 17,878 per game average for the pre-lockout 2003-04 season two years prior (a year that had 30 sellouts). A sellout Kings crowd at the Staples Center is 18,118. The team also had 94 percent season ticket renewal after the lockout ended.

Another way McGowan said the team is hoping to win fans back? Game-day give-aways.

This year the team is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on fan freebies, including a series of four collectible mini-jerseys in honor of the club's 40th anniversary. The jerseys will be given away at four games in December.

By ANNE RILEY-KATZ

Staff Reporter